Last week, Germany coach Joachim Low announced that his squad will be barred from having sex during the tournament. The ban, which also includes alcohol and social media, is a move toward minimizing distraction or anything else that could deter performance.
The Mexico national team defeated Scotland 1-0 in a relatively poor performance on Saturday night. It was the team’s final friendly before heading to Europe for the 2018 World Cup. On Monday the Mexico team announced its final 23-man roster and on Tuesday the team flew to Denmark. But all the Mexican tabloids want to talk about is the El Tri party that took place on Saturday night.
MasterCard announced a campaign to donate hundreds of thousands of meals to starving children in Latin America and the Caribbean in relation to Lionel Messi, Neymar and the upcoming World Cup. It should’ve been a slam-dunk publicity stunt, raising awareness for kids going hungry and feeding them. Instead, the Messi MasterCard campaign is getting torched on social media.
Early in the second half of Saturday's Champions League final, Liverpool fans were still hot over Sergio Ramos' controversial tackle that knocked Mo Salah out of the game. Ironically, the focus on Salah might have detracted from the attention given to a Sergio Ramos elbow on Liverpool keeper Loris Karius.
USWNT legend Brandi Chastain, who was born in San Jose, California, was inducted into the Bay Area Hall of Fame on Monday, and the two-time World Cup champion and two-time Olympic gold-medalist was honored with a plaque that commemorated her achievements over the years.
Zlatan Ibrahimovic had one bad case of the Mondays for the LA Galaxy. Playing in a rare Monday afternoon match against the Montreal Impact, Ibrahimovic was shown red for a petulant slap upside the head of Michael Petrasso in the 41st minute. To make matters worse, Ibra then made a slow, unconvincing move to the ground to pretend to be injured.
The Argentine Football Association (AFA) recently published a handbook for their executives, players, coaches and journalists travelling to Russia for the World Cup, and in the handbook was a section on how to flirt with the Russian women. As expected, there was plenty of outrage from people, and now the AFA has been forced to apologise.
The controversy happened after the largest women’s march took place in Buenos Aires, the capital city of Argentina.
In 1998, France won its only World Cup title, defeating Brazil 3-0 in the final at the Stade de France just outside of Paris. It was the culmination of an impressive tournament for Les Bleus and the perfect way for the country to win its first World Cup on home soil. Apparently, it was too perfect, according to France’s Michel Platini.
Investment banks are big into making predictions — by their very nature they have to be good at it. But the UBS World Cup predictions might need a bit more work. The company gave Italy a 1.6 percent chance to win the World Cup, even though the Azzurri aren’t even in the tournament.
UBS, which stands for you don’t really need to know for the sake of this article, is an investment bank based out of Switzerland. They recently employed 18 analysts and editors and ran computer simulations to predict the most likely winner of the 2018 World Cup.